Impotent Fathers: Patriarchy and Demographic Crisis in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

This book is the first major study to apply recent research on population history to issues of partite, property, and gender in the early English novel. Impotent Fathers argues that the absence of patriarchal power shapes the lives of characters otherwise as different as Joseph Andrews, Roderick Random, and Clarissa Harlow. In novels by Fielding and Burney, Smollett and Inchbald, Defoe and Lennox alike, the patriarch is an impaired, frequently absent figure-one whose power must be represented, as it is in seventeenth-century legal writing, by a woman.